Every property service available in Empire
All twenty-two carry an Empire page of their own, written from the town's sewer, storm and county permit record. Five answer at any hour; planned trades are scheduled from the request form.
Emergency restoration and mitigation
Debris and hauling
Construction and reconstruction
Building envelope and structure
Site and paving
Maintenance
What Empire buildings need, and when
Empire took its present form in 1908, when a railroad station and a few buildings went up and took the name of an older settlement across the Tuolumne. The census district covers 1.168 square miles and counted 4,202 people in 2020. Its median year built is 1972: some 42 percent of homes predate 1970 and 41 percent came in the 1970s, with 995 single-family houses and 163 mobile homes.
Seven dry months and five wet ones divide the working year. The nearest normals station, at the Modesto airport, records 12.27 inches of rain a year, 2.57 of it in January and none at all in July, when the normal high reaches 95 degrees. Roofs, gutters and yard grading are put right in the dry half, along with paving, sealcoating and painting; from late autumn the work turns to drainage, leaks and the water that gets into buildings on Yosemite Boulevard and Santa Fe Avenue.
Drainage is the open question here, and it is still being built. A 2013 County filing set out curb, gutter, street and storm collection work for the whole community in four phases, the first complete; a 2014 negative declaration instead described bio-retention swales holding storm water and treating it by percolation. The capital plan now carries an Empire storm drain trunk line to the river, its completion date recorded as to be determined.
The sewer is the other pressure on any rebuild. A capacity study found the collection system at 90 percent, averaging 168,761 gallons a day, with the main pipeline to Modesto also at 90 percent and most sewage moving through old, undersized pipelines. Since 2015 the City of Modesto has held the infrastructure, as the County capital plan records.
Empire areas served
Each Empire service page takes these twelve areas in turn, because a town this size still changes block by block.
Yosemite Boulevard (SR 132) commercial strip
The main commercial frontage, carrying 14,900 vehicles a day at Santa Fe Drive, with the post office at 5102 Yosemite Boulevard.
Yosemite Boulevard between A and B Streets
A 3,720 square foot retail building at 4275 Yosemite, backing onto an eighteen foot alley, with a valley gutter capture system proposed for its lot.
Santa Fe Avenue and the rail line
The second commercial street, alongside the BNSF and Modesto and Empire Traction railways and close to the Tuolumne River and Dry Creek.
Southeast lettered streets, E to I Streets
Blocks from 3rd Street south to Sunshine Court where the City filed in 2026 to replace water mains and raise fire flow.
Abbie Street rezone sites
Five parcels of vacant land set for rezoning at twenty-five dwellings an acre, one of them County-owned.
I Street and the Empire Library
The library at 98 I Street, with a new building of about 5,000 square feet listed among the County's completed projects.
South Avenue
An emergency shelter of 73 beds at 6132 South Avenue, in the area with the County's highest unincorporated homeless count.
Codoni Road at Highway 132
The point where the sanitary district's pipe to Modesto was monitored and found to be running at 90 percent of flow capacity.
MID Lateral No. 1
An irrigation lateral and an aqueduct shown on the County's rezone maps, running close beside the sites marked for housing.
McClure Road
The Empire Union School District office at 116 North McClure, on a cross street named in a Caltrans curb ramp and sidewalk project.
Claus Road and the Modesto sphere
The western approach, where the whole sanitary district falls inside the City of Modesto's sphere of influence.
Tuolumne River edge
The southern margin, facing the bank where the original Empire City stood, and the outfall the planned storm system was to reach.
Questions from Empire owners and managers
Empire is six road miles from the Modesto base on State Route 132, and the emergency trades work to a 60 to 90 minute window at any hour. The planned trades are not timed in advance: the request is screened, handed to a contractor for that trade, and the visit is arranged directly with them.
Empire is listed as unincorporated, so the Stanislaus County Building Permits Division in Modesto issues the permit, and the contractor assigned to the request files it. The town does sit inside the City of Modesto's sphere of influence, and land use responsibility there is recorded as shared between the County and the City, so an address near the edge is worth checking first.
Yes. Each address is submitted on its own, so a Yosemite Boulevard shop, a house on the lettered streets and a mobile home each keep a separate file, photographs, scope and schedule in the client area. Where one incident needs more than one trade at a single address, the work stays under one file and one contact.
Five of them: water damage restoration, fire and smoke damage, mold remediation, storm damage and board-up, and biohazard cleanup. Those are the trades behind the emergency line. Junk removal, construction and storm debris, roofing, paving, building work, remodeling and the maintenance trades are requested on the form and booked with the contractor assigned to them.
It can. The Empire collection system was measured at 90 percent of capacity, several of its lines are undersized and over thirty years old, and the main to Modesto was found at 90 percent of flow capacity, which the study warned could bring sanitary sewer overflows. Since 2015 a new connection needs written consent from the City of Modesto before it is made.
Property services near Empire
